Riassunto esame Lingua e Traduzione Inglese II, prof.ssa Sciacco, libro consigliato Tourism Discourse Professional Promotional and Digital Voices, Maci

Chapter 1 – The role of discourse in the tourism industry

Introduction

Tourism is a socio-economic phenomenon whose expansion and diversification have contributed to its development into one of the most important economic sectors in the world. So, it’s a well-established social practice involving other fields, from financial, marketing, anthropological, geographical, artistic, to historical, expressed through language.

Since social practices are generated in a social context, discourse analysis implies an investigation of both discourse and social context. Discourse, as an inherent feature of "all social phenomena and all social change is endowed with performative power to bring into being, the very realities it claims to describe. So, tourism discourse, especially in promotional terms, seems to realize what it depicts."

Definition of the genre

One of the features of specialized text is that it has a deep relationship between the type of specialized text and its structure. It’s this conceptual framework responsible for the author’s linguistic choices. Recently, an investigation of textual genres by discourse analysis has been carried out, realizing that expert members of the discourse community use some rhetorical strategies to obtain certain effects. Such strategies are non-discriminative, meaning that the main purpose of the genre is not changed. Also, cross-cultural factors should be considered, since they can influence the way in which genres are constructed and understood.

Tourism as a specialized discourse has its complexity because it is both a promotional language, targeting laymen, and a specialized language used by professionals. Multi-dimensionality in tourism discourse can be seen in different forms:

• Genres characterizing specialized communication can be written documents, professional meetings, video-phone conversations, etc.; people involved in the communicative event: specialist to specialist, specialist to would-be specialist.
• Generic forms typical of non-specialized communication can be tourist guides, brochures, emails, advertising texts, e-tickets, letters, articles in the Press, etc.; people involved in the communicative event: specialist to layman, layman to layman.

Linguistically, tourism can be seen as a macro-specialized discourse that groups together (micro)specialized languages of the different disciplinary domains and sub-domains it deals with and which makes tourism language so difficult to interpret. Discourse is defined as specialized because of the mix of specific lexical, syntactic, and semantic features which differ from general language. The degree of specialization varies according to the type of pragmatic function.

For example, from a promotional point of view, tourism discourse will be persuasive, rather than specialized, using rhetorical strategies to influence the personal choice of the viewer. From a specialized point of view, it will reflect the specialist use of language in contexts typical of a specialized community.

Lexical features of specialized discourse

Monoreferentiality is the most important feature of the lexicon of specialized discourse, consisting in the fact that in a given context only one meaning is allowed, thus eliminating ambiguity and emphasizing conciseness. For example, carrier, in tourism, is monoreferential, since the term is associated with a category of transportation, the plane, regardless of the airline.

Lack of emotion because words which imply semantic information have only a denotative function, thus eliminating emotions and any connotative meaning. For example, in tourism, cabin baggage refers only to the type of hand luggage a plane passenger can take into the cabin. So, there’s the lack of emotions and the text is mainly informative. However, when the pragmatic purpose is to persuade, as in promotional texts, specialized texts will feature an emphasis on emotions.

Precision requires transparency, in fact, the surface form, even if a suffix or a word, identifies immediately a concept, thus eliminating polysemy and ambiguity.

Conciseness is based on the principle of minimax i.e. the minimal efforts of the addressee to reach maximal specificity. It’s the expression of terms in the shortest possible forms. So, for example, such strategies are used:

• Acronyms (LOS, Length of Stay, FIT, Foreign Independent Travel)
• Abbreviations (Comp to indicate complimentary / free)
• Eponyms (J.F.K. - New York airport, Marco Polo – Venice airport)
• Zero derivation: check-in (noun) derived from the verb to check-in
• Blending: campsite vs. camping site
• Juxtaposition which omits prepositions and premodifiers in nominal groups i.e. Fly-Cruise Package, a package which includes air transportation to the port of embarkation and the cruise itself
• Specialization of words drawn from general language (bed-night in the hotel industry meaning one person for one night)

Specialized and general lexis: semantic evolution and metaphorization

We can see how semantic evolution derives from the specialization of word-meaning originally belonging to general language. “Sustainability” (n.) from the verb “to sustain” “to support”, the adjective “sustainable” developed in the 1970s. The noun “sustainability” derived from the adjective with the sense of “support”. Then, it has extended its meaning to acquire the specialized sense of designating forms of human economic activity and culture that don’t harm the environment.

Also, specialization is possible thanks to the creation of new lexemes along existing ones that are not appropriate for the particular field, as in e-commerce which refers to the semantic field of business but specifies a new type of online process, and commerce, referring to the traditional kind of business. However, metaphorization is the most used strategy to create new and specialized meanings, since metaphors enable us to express long sentences in a few words. For example, we can have “a fly-drive package to escape from our stressful society to a real paradise.” They are also used to create effective specialized texts.

Conciseness is one of the main strategies in producing effective specialized discourse.